Tuesday, October 30, 2012

The Tale of the Haunted Laboratory

Published in the Journal of the
Society for Psychical Research, Vol. 62, No 851 April 1998 by Vic Tandy and
Tony R Lawrence of Coventry University.

Not too long ago, in a lab not too
far away there was a haunting. This lab was a spacious playground for engineers,
and housed many odd contraptions. But this isn’t a story about what work went
on in the lab, this is a story about the haunting of this lab.

One morning an engineer arrived
early to find a distressed cleaner. When he talked to the cleaner she admitted
that she was shaken up due to having felt a presence in the lab. Not only that,
she claimed to have seen something. Our engineer does not believe in ghost or
supernatural things and just shrugged the incident off.

However, soon he, too, was noticing
things. He sensed an odd dark mood in the room, almost depressing. Occasionally
he had a cold shiver, or a feeling that someone was standing right beside him,
but the closest person was across the room. These observations were made by all
three regular inhabitants of this lab.

A feeling of unease and discomfort
about this particular lab began to grow, and then to spread. However the
workers were very busy people and tried their best to ignore it.

One night,

our engineer was working late

… alone.

Even though he was sweating he
began to feel cold, he felt depressed, groans and creaks from the empty factory
that housed the lab only added to his growing discomfort. But there was also
something else. He kept feeling that there was someone in the room, but that
was impossible. There was no way for anyone to enter or exit the lab without
walking past his desk.

And yet…the feeling was there.

This being a lab, there were all
sorts of gasses and chemicals around that if inhaled could cause all sorts of
problems. He began to check everything in lab to make sure nothing was leaking.
Everything was fine, everything looked normal. Annoyed with himself he went and
got a cup of coffee, tried to laugh it off and went back to work.

And then

It happened

He began to feel like he was being
watched…

AND THEN HE SAW SOMETHING!

To his left a figure emerged! It
was faint and on the periphery of his vision but it moved, and it moved JUST
LIKE A PERSON! It was gray and made no sound but there it was, moving towards
him. The hairs on his neck were standing straight up, and he was terrified!
Slowly, he worked up the courage to face this apparition. As he slowly turned
his head the figure vanished, leaving no evidence of its existence.

Badly shaken from this experience,
he quickly called it a night and went home.

Now our story could end there with
the mysterious ghost apparition in the lab, appearing late at night when you
are working alone, and vanishing when you look at it. But that is not the end
of our story, no, for he IS an engineer and the very next day he was back in
the lab.

Now he was entering a fencing
competition and had some work to do on his blade. He didn’t have to do this in
the lab, but decided there was plenty of room and all the tools he needed, so
he decided to bring his supplies into the lab to do this work. He placed the
blade in a vise on a table in the middle of the lab and left it to go look for
something else he needed in order to finish this work.

Again

… something ...

happened

When he returned, the free end of
the blade was violently vibrating! Given the events of the previous night he
was understandably terrified! However, this being daylight hours and being an
engineer, he took a deep breath and composed himself and curiosity took over.
What was making the blade move? The blade had to be receiving energy from
somewhere in order for it to move in such a manner! This energy had to have a
varying intensity at a rate that was precisely that of the resonant frequency
of the blade. This type of energy is known as sound. He took stock of the
sounds he could hear in the room. A lab can be a very noisy place, but an
engineer also knows that there is sound we can’t hear, frequencies too low for
humans to resolve. He starts to experiment with the hypothesis that what is
causing his blade to move is this low frequency sound known as infrasound.

He moved the blade around the room
noticing the amplitude of the vibrations and found that in the center of the
lab it was the largest, and that the vibrations in the blade stopped all
together at the far end of the lab. Curious! Then it hit him! A low frequency
standing wave! He did some quick calculations to see what frequency this wave
would be given the size of the lab (see actual paper). This quick calculation
resulted in a wave of approximately 18.89 Hz or 18.89 cycles per second which
is below the lower end of human hearing at 20 Hz.

“So…” he thought “we are sharing
the lab with a 19Hz wave. But where is it coming from and what do these sorts of
waves do to people?”

Our engineer quickly found the
source of this wave. A quick round of questions revealed that a new fan had
recently been installed at one end of the lab. When this was switched off the
vibrations in his blade vanished. That problem solved he began to research what
sort of effects these waves have on humans.
This involved a bit of research.

There was a report of workers in a
factory reporting that a specific bay made them feel uneasy. This was explained
by a higher level of low frequency sound in that area of the factory due to a
fan in the AC system. There was also a report of a group of workers at a
university who all reported the same uneasy feeling and dizziness when a
specific fan was turned on. These cases were explained by low frequency sound
in the 15-20Hz range.

But what about the apparition that
appeared? Further research produced a resonance frequency of the human eyeball
in a NASA report! 18Hz causes the eyeball to vibrate and created a smearing of
vision.

He had identified his ghost. It was
a standing wave caused by a new fan in the lab.

Now for the exorcism! A
modification was made to the mounting of the fan and the standing wave, ghost,
uneasy feeling, and chills vanished from the lab!

So next time you think you see a
ghost, remember it might just be infrasound!

(This story was a retelling of the excellent paper written
by our hero Vic Tandy and Tony R Lawrence about an experience that V. Tandy had
while working in the lab mentioned in this story. Their paper “Ghost in the Machine” is an
excellent read, and one of my favorite infrasound stories. I decided it could
use a Halloween spin! I hope you enjoyed this little ghost story!)